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Very true that AT&T was no saint but it should come as no surprise that Bell Labs is romanticized when one looks at how Epic their output was. From a sample of their employees we have: Information Theory, karnaugh maps, the transistor, laser, photovoltaics, CCDs, C,R, Unix and for kicks - stumbling upon CMB hence enriching our understanding of the universe, it's age and size. It's mind boggling. No company today comes anywhere near that in terms of fundamentally rearranging knowledge and society.

I would argue that if Bell Labs was 8 or 9 on the Richter Scale then Microsoft Research, at a 4 or 5, is the closest we have today in terms of independence and diversity of research unfettered by profit concerns.

One guess for why Bell Labs was able to achieve so much is that on one hand they had decades of fundamental new insights by Brilliant physicists and mathematicians ripe for the picking (as evinced by multiple cases of identical independent inventions) and on the other hand they had the backing of a monopoly of incredible proportions. The planets don't often align like that.

Monopolies and excess profit are almost always a sign of market failure. However, some have argued that one of the benefits of a monopoly is it allows firms to reinvest some of that beyond normal profits and reduced costs on R&D (also typically argue monopolies are temporary because creative destruction). If you consider that only those like Google, Samsung, GE, IBM and Microsoft can even consider such broad-based research then it seems there is merit to the idea. Yet, the terrain of something so complex as innovative output should not have a single and global optimum.

Other monopolies have produced great things: Xerox's PARC labs, IBM.

But not always: Standard Oil, East India Company.

Maybe opportunity (as you note) plays a part.

> East India Company

Another issue might be that we are focussing a bit too much on technical innovation. Because if you mean the Dutch East India Company (better known as the VOC), there is no denying that it was very innovative from an economics standpoint.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

At the risk of sounding like that guy who said that everything that could be invented, was, I'd add a third point that Bell Labs' heyday was right during a golden era of discovery where there was a ton of low hanging fruit to be had. It was really a perfect storm of science.

I doubt this could be repeated today even if you somehow copy pasted the Bell Labs from 1960 including their staff and culture. I'd love to be wrong about this :-(

3D printing? Drones - flying and driving? Robotics? CERN? Always on, location-aware connectivity? Quantum Computing? Automatic speech and text translation? Amazon-scale logistics calculations? Recommendation engines?

How are we not in a goldener age of discovery now?

I appreciate your positive outlook :-) There is no doubt a great deal of technical advancement under way today, but it seems mostly applied, incremental work. Perhaps we're nearing the end of a Kuhn-like cycle of scientific advancement and some kind of breakthrough will kick things off again.

How is automating driving incremental?

Quantum computing? jAs a sometimes-Bayesian statistician - do you know the torment I will be able to unleash on the scientific world once MCMC inference is practically for free? Just imagine... spending all your time carefully choosing distributions for your data and uncertainty, and the implementation of the inference is an afterthought? I need a moment alone.

Perhaps one reason for the change is also that finding cool and new stuff was "easier" 50 years ago. In my opinion all the low hanging fruits are already taken and in order to invent a new transistor you need more than just a few guys sitting in a room with little equitment.

Glad you point out that Bell Labs' gifts to the public domain were involuntary (they distributed unix source code without giving away the rights, then took them back; UC Berkeley then created a free replacement so they could keep teaching OS courses and At&T tried to sue them to oblivion and lost).

If you want to make the argument that Google isn't Bell Labs, it's probably better to point out that Google isn't really tackling really fundamental research projects like inventing the transistor and the laser. Even producing Go isn't on par with C because C was amazing and unique for its time, whereas Go is just part of a flood of new languages.

Bell Labs:UNIX::Google:Linux distribution.

Google isn't doing basic research like measuring and discovering the background radiation from the origins of the universe.

But if they wanted to, its more than within their ability. I'm sure they have plenty of idle computing time to do so with the proper physical sensors providing data.

Computer power (or lack thereof) is definitely not the limiting reagent in science today.

I think this is only true if you don't consider trillion-fold cost reduction as an option.

A few years back I worked on data taking for the CMS detector at the LHC. We were Tier1 in the US; we took the data from Tier0 at the physical detector and distributed it to 800+ orgs around the work. We had 6000+ linux machines and a staff of 10.

To say computing power isn't the limiting factor is disingenuous. Yes, you can go spin up thousands of instances in Amazon and store PB of data. Show me your budget to do so though.

That was an accident that turned out to be pretty damned amazing

"chance favors the prepared mind"

Actually, Google has helped to discover planets, among other things

See, e.g., http://research.google.com/pubs/author37653.html

Isn't Google doing fundamental research on AI?

No. They give prizes, maybe fund researchers, but they don't assign people to do fundamental research. Unless you call the youtube-cats and driver-less cars fundamental.

I've always had the impression that MSR (Microsoft Research) was generally doing much more fundamental research than Google.

Google still has a ways to go to even be on par with HP Labs or PARC, let alone Bellabs.

Let's not forget all the research IBM Research Labs did over the years (less so now due to focusing on profit, but they still were doing more fundamental research than google even in recent memory).

> they distributed unix source code without giving away the rights, then took them back

I always found it ironic (or perhaps subversive, not sure which) that the guys in the Unix room later based 8th Edition Research Unix on 4.1cBSD.

What do you think made C such an amazing language compared to say Pascal and Fortrant?

I like C and how it handles pointers and arrays but was it really such a departure from what was available then?

I'm not dissing Pascal or Fortran. But C was tied to UNIX (and a toolchain such as lex/yacc) in a way that allowed UNIX to be quickly and cheaply ported which made it revolutionary. Fortran and Pascal lacked similar infrastructure (eventually there was Oberon which was kind of like the Lisp or Smalltalk stacks but never took off).

Lisp and Smalltalk would be the comparables, but Lisp was not portable the way C is and Smalltalk was very slow.

The parent is spot on. Bell Labs was the first to leave the Multics project.

It took several years for Thompson, Ritchie, McIlroy and Ossanna to get funding.

They did it under the radar with a PDP-7 garbage picked by Thompson while sending letter after letter to get funding for a DEC PDP-10 or Sigma7 which they would use to create the OS and play games/simulations (i.e. Space Travel). Mind you computer time in the late 60's was upwards to $75 and hour.

After all is said and done Bell Labs at the time was a government regulated national telecommunications monopoly and was not allowed to sell it. They could licenses it though and did. Berkeley only had to pay for the tapes since they where a school.

FWIW they didn't get the funding based on asking to program an unspecified OS but to create system specifically designed for editing and formatting text. The big buzzword back then was "word processing". Also the higher ups already knew by then that they had something which Ken and Dennis had done on their own. AT&T bought them a PDP-11 and the first end user applications where for AT&T patent dept. to be used by secretaries.

Thus, during 1969, we began trying to find an alternative to Multics. The search took several forms. Throughout 1969 we (mainly Ossanna, Thompson, Ritchie) lobbied intensively for the purchase of a medium-scale machine for which we promised to write an operating system; the machines we suggested were the DEC PDP-10 and the SDS (later Xerox) Sigma 7. The effort was frustrating, because our proposals were never clearly and finally turned down, but yet were certainly never accepted. Several times it seemed we were very near success. The final blow to this effort came when we presented an exquisitely complicated proposal, designed to minimize financial outlay, that involved some outright purchase, some third-party lease, and a plan to turn in a DEC KA-10 processor on the soon-to-be-announced and more capable KI-10. The proposal was rejected, and rumor soon had it that W. O. Baker (then vice-president of Research) had reacted to it with the comment `Bell Laboratories just doesn't do business this way!' --Ritchie 1979 http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html

Towards the end of the 80's Berkeley students took a nod from Richard Stallman and put their distribution on the net (which was mostly rewritten at that point (It was Keith Bostic who proposed removal of non-AT&T code)).

ATT UNIX was licensed at about $200k while the BSD patchset was just a piece of software you added if for anything the TCP/IP stack, vi, job control, curses, mail services and csh.

I don't for a minute believe that Google or ATT are in any way for the greater good of society and research any more than I would believe that apple or microsoft care about education and/or removing vender lock-in. It's not like any of the aforementioned monopolies have invested in real problems like cancer research and/or a cure.

If you want to explore the innovators it's best to look at the McIlroys, Thompsons and Ritchies, Bostics and Stallmans and so fourth who really did innovate and change our lives for the better.

Additionally the author is wrong about Google having to maximize shareholder returns.

Google has dual class shares, so the only people Google realy has to please are Larry Page and Sergy Brin.

AT&T operated under the idea of a steady rate of return for its shareholders, versus simply maximizing the rate of return. So there was money to pay for the labs, each local bell operating company paid IIRC 1.5% of its revenues to the labs for the right to use the work they produced.

I think that's an interesting observation about changes in the past few decades in how how corporations see their responsibilities to stakeholders.

I think it's true that 30-40 years ago, compared to now, corporations more often were guided by things other than simply maximizing share prices. It's not unique to AT&T, and has nothing to do with AT&T not being a publicly traded corporation, which of course it was.